I was interested to see if my almost 22 month old little monster was able to manipulate the tongs well enough to be able to have enough control to place the pom-poms in the individual holes of the ice-cube tray...and you know what...he could do it :)

He had a fabulous time doing this activity and it kept him extremely busy for more than 30min, in fact he wanted to keep going with the activity when it was time to pack up for lunch :P

If you wanted to make the activity a little harder for your toddler, you could add in an element of colour sorting, like has been shown here (top, left hand photo - photo is by The Activity Mom).